Computing Made Good, Easy

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Computing Made Good, Easy

If only people would change. Computing has changed, but people remain the same. We're using computers designed for printing, when we should be using computers designed for networking.

But with a bit of effort it's possible to hack your computer into something resembling a Sixties-era Unix box. Do it, and it'll return some productivity to your life.

Back in 1987, John M. Carroll and Mary Beth Rosson published a paper called the "Paradox of the active user."

In this study of how non-technical people use computers, they observed that people don't read manuals. And once they figure out how to achieve something, they will not change their protocol even if doing things a different way is quicker.

It's paradoxical because people would save time if they learned how to use computers in an optimal way. But most computer users are laboring under this paradox right now.

Microsoft's Office suite remains virtually unchanged since the days of the standalone PC, when a computer's main job was to convert bits (digital data) into atoms (paper) via a printer.

Microsoft's Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and much of Access, are all built around the idea that bits are most useful when converted to atoms. Outlook, even though it was built for e-mail, betrays its paper-centric heritage through its obsession with formatting, inability to handle plain text well, and monolithic architecture.

In the pre-network days, having a printer substantially increased the utility of a PC. But in the networked world, a PC is only as valuable as the speed of its Internet connection. Checking e-mail, not printing things out, has become the major use for computers (although Office remains necessary for niche applications).

But today's desktop remains mired in the paper-centric world and, because of the active-user paradox, most people have no idea how much this damages their productivity. They're like frogs in boiling water.

The Unix community, whose design philosophy, tools, and culture grew out of the Internet itself, figured out how to use a computer in the networked world years ago.

Unix uses quick-to-transmit plain text files instead of large, slow, printer-centric documents. Unix ties together multiple small programs to create systems both simple and powerful, instead of building complicated, monolithic applications that must compromise between flexibility and ease-of-use.

And without the baggage of printer-centric programs, Unix focuses on directly manipulating the bits themselves, not bloated electronic representations of paper documents.

Non-technical users can capture the productivity benefits of the Unix design philosophy without abandoning the standard desktop with graphic user interface.

One example is the "Good Easy" environment developed by usability expert Mark Hurst. Based on the Macintosh OS 9 operating system, it is used at Creative Good, Hurst's consultancy business.

The Good Easy uses five core applications that pass plain text between each of them in an environment that supports task-switching, automation and information retrieval.

Users can use the clipboard and function keys to rapidly pipe plain text between applications. This switching is so seamless, most users literally don't notice which application they are in at any particular moment, they just get their work done.

There is a text expander, which expands character combinations to longer text strings, e.g. turning "za" into "zimran ahmed" or "dt" into today's date. The expander functions as a writing accelerator, a Passport-style form completer (with none of the security risks and all of the benefits), and customized spell-checker.

The quick-key creator automates common keystroke sequences and enables instant access to frequently referenced text files, such as address lists. Search can look through the contents of all files – which are indexed and mostly in plain text – so quickly it's like having Google for your hard disk.

This system is tied together by a culture that, like Unix, keeps technology simple and understands how to use programs together.

You either delete an e-mail or pipe it through the text editor to strip out the line breaks and save it as plain text on the hard disk.

In fact, anything that can be kept in plain text is – so no more Excel address books with long lists of phone numbers.

Keeping all your data, including e-mail messages, in plain text makes searching quicker and easier because users don't need to run searches in multiple locations.

If users find themselves repeating an action, it can be easily automated. Indeed, Good Easy users share shortcuts, and common ones have already been created.

Good Easy users rarely use the mouse anymore, even while using a GUI like Mac or Windows.

All of this is familiar to Unix folk, but difficult for Windows users to embrace.

Many Windows users do not understand why plain text is important. They are content to shuffle text between applications, and happily let e-mail pile up in their inbox. And in the Windows world, forget about automating away repetitive tasks – it's way too difficult, no matter how much tedium it saves users. The Active User Paradox is alive and well.

Unix people have already figured out how to manage workflow in a networked environment.

Businesses that learn these lessons will have more productive workers, lower tech-support costs, and less vendor lock-in than their competitors.

And you don't have to operate at the command line level or be a programmer to enjoy the productivity benefits the Unix philosophy offers: It can be ported to the GUI.

Zimran Ahmed is a consultant and programmer who writes regularly for his WinterSpeak website.